Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
In the first week of November last year, just as the temperatures really dropped and winter announced its arrival, we took a few days off to head out on a microadventure with some friends. James and Mat were joined by Will Meyer and Rob Craig (Will being one of the siblings behind London based Brother Cycles), and the plan was to spend three or four days bikepacking along the coast road in the far south west, pausing along the way to bodysurf...
365 days;12 months; four seasons; one year. We all need a bit of help organising our time and remembering important dates and events, be it a...
For the past couple of years, our friends over the hill at Finisterre have been working on developing a wetsuit designed specifically for surfing...
What a week it’s been; this time last week a coach load of surfers, including three-times world surfing champion Tom Curren, big wave surfers...
Last Saturday, Michael woke up with no idea what he would be doing for the next week; a few months previously his wife had told him that she was...
Ben Cook has been a friend of ours for a good few years now, and we often meet up to ride waves with him when we head to surf spots on the coastline south and west of our workshop. Ben is an artist who moved to Cornwall in 2004 and, rather than conforming to producing the standard coastal landscapes to sell to summer holiday visitors, he used his background in fine art and his passion for surfing to begin exploring surf culture in his work.
Our Annual Gathering of Makers is our chance to say thank you; an opportunity for us to invite everyone who has supported us these past few years by...
Following an exhaustive period of research and development (which you can translate as us making a surfboard and riding it as often as we could...
After August delivered us a mixed bag of weather and waves (to put a positive spin on it), the first Sunday of September at least dawned sunny and...
Tealing We’d like to introduce all of you to The Coaster, the latest addition to our range and a surfboard that we’ve been struggling to keep...
The British summer holidays are bellyboard season; that time of year when old plywood boards are pulled out of the backs of sheds and garages, dusted off and carried out to waist deep water to catch a whitewater wave back to shore on. These four foot by one foot surfcraft are as quintessentially British as eating an ice-cream behind a wind-break, and have a loyal following that spans generations, demonstrated perfectly by the huge popularity...
July was a good and busy month for wooden surfboard workshops here at Otter, and at the very end of the month we welcomed Marc Koska to the...
Last Saturday, James and Liz became Mr and Mrs Otter. Hooray!
In the mid-nineties, an ex-pat Aussie lifeguard residing in Hawaii named Andy Cochran started to develop a new type of swim fin. His aim was to...
Last weekend we joined the wonderful team from Surfers Against Sewage at Somersault Festival in North Devon for a weekend of mud, music and...
For many families, school summer holidays involve going away somewhere and spending a week or so together making memories and enjoying each others company. What can often happen though, is that the kids end up doing different activities whilst mum and dad enjoy lunch or a quiet walk, before picking them up later. Not the Summerfield family, however. This lovely family of six spent all of last week with us making their own 9’8” stand-up...
A few weeks before Claire arrived in the UK from California, a large package arrived at the Otter Workshop addressed to her. When we opened it...
It's often been said when trying to describe the sensation of getting barrelled that "time slows down in the tube". We think that time slows down...
A few weeks ago Chris arrived at the workshop to spend a week helping us machine timber in preparation for a "Make-Your-Own" wooden surfboard course,...
